


Commiseration

by sternflammenden



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Crack Pairing, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-23
Updated: 2012-03-23
Packaged: 2017-11-02 09:33:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 719
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/367541
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sternflammenden/pseuds/sternflammenden
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Barbrey and Petyr have several things in common.  One of them is Brandon Stark. </p>
<p>Written for the <a href="http://clashofqueens.livejournal.com/1527.html">Minor ASOIAF Character Ficathon</a> on LiveJournal.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Commiseration

She traces the scar, the one that he has taken pains never to reveal to anyone. Not to Cat, flight of fancy though it was. Not to Lysa, the poor copy, his departed wife. And never to Alayne, no, never to her. He’d rather not think on _that_ though, as he sits in his bedchamber with Barbrey, her graying hair unbound, her small, still-high breasts half covered by it. It pains him to contemplate her sometimes, for she is so secure in her age, so settled in her skin, that it reminds him how much that he is not. And this isn’t something that Petyr wants to acknowledge. 

They do have some things in common, that much sits well with him. Her hands are just as unclean, and while she never will reveal exactly what her role was in Manderly’s trump and the Boltons’ swift plummet from their stolen grace, he knows that she is no innocent. And she has declared for the girl, as she calls her, for Sansa, seeing in that an opportunity not only for survival, but for preservation, for who best to validate her lonely years as ruling party than the Queen in the North? 

And then, there’s Brandon. 

At first, she was reluctant to speak of it, but when they are both in their cups, sometimes the words creep out, traitorous, and she tells him of their frantic meetings, rutting in Godswoods, hands groping flesh under tables at feasts, and he is almost impressed with her frank blasphemy. 

That night, when the wine has ebbed and the fire left smoldering, she kisses him. It’s sharp, sharp like her words, like her gaze, like her decided little gestures that he’s noticed. She doesn’t trouble herself with his moustache as Lysa had, nor his slightness as Cat had, but leans into him as if it’s instinctual. 

Maybe it is, maybe it’s another feint, like the one she’d pulled on Bolton. She’d laughed cruelly when she told him about that, her eyes flaming when she detailed his ruin, the haphazard alliance with the Freys, a marriage of convenience, and ridiculous blindness to the bastard, the red threat in the room. But she’d played the loyal, dutiful sister-in-law so well that he’d never thought to look for the knife that she ground, long in years, in her breast, or the poison that she nursed, distilled finely, in her heart. 

She knows the game well, and he wonders sometimes, if this is just one more for her. 

But he doesn’t often think of that. 

Her fingers run along the puckered flesh, pink and faded with the years, and as she does, something vulnerable creeps into the cast of her eyes, and she looks up at him through her lashes. “A fool, he was,” she says, so softly that he can barely hear it, but it is there, hovering in the still air of his rooms. 

He is surprised at such disloyalty. 

“A fool?” he says, a harsh sort of mirth in his voice, his eyes glinting. “Fool enough to be your lover?” 

Barbrey looks away then. “And a fool I was. But not so great as to spare a man’s life when he coveted what was his.” She smirks, and the tension breaks. 

Petyr, in spite of himself, in spite of the years of bitterness, laughs, and when she joins in, the room seems so much brighter, even though Barbrey’s eyes are hard, the years gone by too fast, and his Cat gone. 

But he doesn’t think of that as her hand traces the length of the old wound, meandering down his chest, across the flat plane of his stomach, and lights at last, on his sex. Despite his wishes to toy with her, to deny her this somehow, even though it is not the first time that they have lain together, he feels himself harden at her touch, her fingers so precise, so direct. 

If she were not so elegant in her approach, he would almost call it brutal. Perhaps though, that is not a bad thing. 

“But enough of him,” Barbrey says, reclining, her hand trailing away almost maddeningly. “We are alive, and he is dead, and that is for the best. Wouldn’t you agree?” 

Her hands clutch at him, drawing him down, and he permits it.


End file.
